Eight years ago, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency organized a painful-to-watch contest that involved robots slowly struggling (and often failing) to perform a series of human tasks, including opening doors, operating power tools, and driving golf carts. Clips of them fumbling and stumbling through the Darpa Robotics Challenge soon went viral.

Today the descendants of those hapless robots are a lot more capable and graceful. Several startups are developing humanoids that they claim could, in just a few years, find employment in warehouses and factories. 

Jerry Pratt, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a nonprofit research institute in Florida, led a team that came second in the Darpa challenge back in 2015. He is now a cofounder of Figure AI, a company building a humanoid robot designed for warehouse work that today announced $70 million in investment funding.

Pratt says that if Darpa’s challenge were run today, robots would be able to complete the challenges in about a quarter of the 50 minutes it took his robot to complete the course, with few accidents. “From a technical point of view, a lot of enabling technologies have popped up recently,” he says.

More advanced computer vision, made possible through developments in machine learning over the past decade, has made it a lot easier for machines to navigate complex environments and do tasks like climbing stairs and grasping objects. More power-dense batteries, produced as a result of electric vehicle development, have also made it possible to pack sufficient juice into a humanoid robot for it to move its legs quickly enough to balance dynamically—that is, to steady itself when it slips or misjudges a step, as humans can.

Pratt says his company’s robot is taking its first steps around a mocked-up warehouse in Sunnyvale, California. Brett Adcock, Figure’s CEO, reckons it should be possible to build humanoids at the same cost of making a car, providing there is enough demand to ramp up production.

If Adcock is right about that, then the field of robotics is approaching a crucial moment. You’re probably familiar with the dancing Atlas humanoid robots that have been racking up YouTube likes for several years. They are made by Boston Dynamics, a pioneer of legged locomotion that built some of the humanoids used at the Darpa contest, and show that making capable robots in the shape of a human is possible. But these robots have been extremely expensive—the original Atlas cost several million dollars—and lacked the software needed to make them autonomous and useful.

Apptronik Astra robot.Courtesy of Apptronik

Figure is not the only company betting that humanoid robots are maturing. Others include 1X, Apptronik, and Tesla. Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, paid a visit to the original Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2015. The fact that he is now keen on building a humanoid himself suggests that some of the technologies needed to make such a machine are finally viable.

Jonathan Hurst, a professor at Oregon State University and cofounder of Agility Robotics, was also at the Darpa challenge to give a demo of a walking robot he built. Agility has been working on legged robots for a while, but Hurst says the company has taken a physics-first approach to locomotion instead of copying the mechanics of human limbs. Although its robots are humanoid, they have legs that look like they might’ve been inspired by an ostrich.

At a manufacturing industry event called ProMat this March, Agility’s robots wowed the crowds with demonstrations of warehouse tasks such as picking totes from shelves and placing them onto conveyors fully autonomously. 

There are, of course, already plenty of warehouse and manufacturing robots out there that use wheels rather than legs. And warehouses can be designed to make clever use of more conventional automation like conveyor belts.

Agility Robot demo at ProMat 2023.Courtesy of Agility Robotics

But Melonee Wise, Agility’s CTO, says there are many situations where legs are far superior, especially at companies that cannot afford to entirely remake their operations around automation. Humanoid robots can more easily navigate stairs, ramps, and unsteady ground; squeeze into tight spaces; and bend down or reach up as they work, Wise says. She’s a recent convert to team humanoid, and was until recently CEO of Fetch Robotics, which makes wheeled warehouse robots.

“The market is ready,” Wise says, adding that the main challenge ahead will be increasing reliability: “The secret to success in robotics is failing gracefully.” They might not have been graceful, but the clumsy robots of the Darpa challenge were well ahead of their time.

Humanoid Robots Are Coming of Age

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Colourless nanoparticles used to create lightweight, colourful paint

Led by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the investigation involved a 40-year-old man named Gert-Jan, who had been paralyzed by a biking accident over a decade ago.

Gert-Jan had previously regained some ability to walk with the help of a front-wheel walker. For the three years before enrolling in the latest test though, he had reached a "neurological recovery plateau".

One of the implants tested on Gert-Jan sat above his brain, decoding electrical signals that initiated movement. It communicated with another implant connected to the part of the spinal cord responsible for triggering motion in his legs. Together, they're able to bypass the injured section of his cervical spinal cord, wirelessly reestablishing the link between his brain and body.

The implants seemed to not only restore some of the damaged connectivity in Gert-Jan's central nervous system the more they were used: after a year of working with the implants, and undergoing physical therapy, his walking ability had improved to the point he could walk with crutches even when the devices were turned off.

That's a good sign at least some of his neurons reorganized to restore communication, according to the researchers.

"We have created a wireless interface between the brain and the spinal cord using brain-computer interface (BCI) technology that transforms thought into action," says EPFL neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine.

The setup of the digital bridge implants. (Lorach et al., Nature, 2023)

Over the course of 12 months, the digital bridge implants were shown to help Gert-Jan walk and stand more naturally, without the extra wearable motion sensors used in previously tested technologies to detect and stimulate movement. In addition, the Brain-Spine Interface (BSI) introduced in this trial meant he could climb stairs and get across varying terrain (such as steep ramps, for example) – challenges that he couldn't manage before.

Key to the system are a series of artificial intelligence algorithms that are able to adapt and learn with user prompting. The patient has to train the model so it can decode which brain thoughts correspond to which movements, a process that takes a surprisingly short amount of time.

"The patient has first to learn how to work with his brain signals, and we also have to learn how to correlate these brain signals to the spinal cord stimulation," says Jocelyne Bloch, a neurosurgeon from EPFL. "This is pretty short: in a few sessions, everything is linked."

< Watch the video at the source page. >

While this type of system won't work for every kind of spinal cord injury, and has only been tested on one person, there's huge potential here for using technology and AI to fill in the gaps in the nervous system caused by injury.

For Gert-Jan the progress has been slow at times, but his quality of life has been significantly improved by the implants, which he used at home. For instance, he can now stand at a bar to enjoy a beer with friends – something seemingly small that most of us take for granted, but which means a lot to Gert-Jan and his recovery.

"This simple pleasure represents a significant change in my life," he says.

The research has been published in Nature.

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Marie Curie is remembered today for her pioneering work on radioactivity, which not only earned her two Nobel Prizes but also the recognition as the “mother of modern physics”. But while her research into the radioactive elements polonium and radium may have secured her a lasting scientific legacy, those same substances have also had a lasting effect on her body.

Curie was not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but also the only woman to be awarded prizes in two different fields. In 1896, the French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium salts emitted rays that were similar to X-rays in their ability to pass through objects. This discovery inspired Curie to explore Becquerel’s findings as part of her research thesis. She and her husband, Pierre Curie, set to work and ended up discovering radium and polonium, two new radioactive elements, in 1898. These results led to the Curies being awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903. The other half went to Becquerel.

Then, in 1911, after much personal tragedy (Pierre Curie had died suddenly 1906), Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for isolating pure radium. She would go on to devote her research to the study of the chemistry of radioactive substances as well as their applications in medicine. In fact, if it were not for Curie’s work, our treatments for cancer would likely not be anywhere near as developed as they are today. But despite advocating precautions, Curie’s consistent and prolonged exposure to these substances came at a cost.

Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934, from aplastic anemia caused by her work with radiation. Despite its name, aplastic anemia is more than just anemia; it is a rare blood condition that appears when bone marrow cannot make enough new blood cells for your body to function properly.

When Curie died, her body was so radioactive that she had to be laid to rest in a lead-lined coffin. However, no one knew this until 1995 when her coffin was exhumed.

At the time, the French authorities wanted to move the Curies to the national mausoleum, the Panthéon, in honor of their contributions to science and for being icons in French history. The officials responsible for the exhumation contacted the French radiation protection agency with concerns about residual radiation and asked for assistance to protect workers in the cemetery.

When the exhumers approached their grave, they detected normal levels of radiation on the air, which then rose as the grave was opened (though not by large amounts). At first, Marie Curie’s coffin appeared to be made of wood, but when opened, they found it was lined with 2.5 millimeters (0.09 inches) of lead. Later examination of Curie’s body revealed that she had remained remarkably well preserved and only small levels of alpha and beta contamination were detected. This, according to the Journal of British Society for the History of Radiology, was likely because Curie had taken steps to limit exposure to radiation in later life.  

Less can be said about her equipment, however. After 100 years, many of her belongings, including furniture, cookbooks, clothes, and laboratory notes remain extremely radioactive. The latter are actually stored in lead-lined boxes at France’s Bibliothèque National in Paris. Upon requesting access to these objects, visitors are required to sign a liability waiver and to wear protective clothing to prevent exposure to radium-226.

Given that this particular isotope has a half-life of around 1,600 years, it is likely that these important documents will remain a harmful reminder of a powerful legacy.

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Vibrio bacteria are known to feast on marine plant and animal tissues on the coastline. When humans consume seafood or seawater infected with these pathogens, they can cause life-threatening illnesses like cholera. The species Vibrio vulnificus can even infect wounds, risking life-threatening destruction of surrounding tissue.

Finding a number of Vibrio species, some of which are undescribed, happily living their best life on waste is far from good news. It's yet another potential vector for human disease that experts have not accounted for. Even worse, the floating habitat isn't going anywhere. In fact, it seems to be expanding in size and washing up on our coastlines like never before.

The recent analysis from Florida Atlantic University included samples of ocean plastic collected in the Caribbean and Sargasso Seas in 2012 and 2013, as well as samples of brown seaweed, called Sargassum, eel larvae, and seawater.

In both the plastic and seaweed samples, the team found multiple species of Vibrio bacteria, some of which have never been seen before.

Further genome analysis suggested that some had "significant pathogenic potential".

In experiments in the lab, the open-ocean bacteria clung to and colonized plastic samples with alarming efficiency.

"Our lab work showed that these Vibrio are extremely aggressive and can seek out and stick to plastic within minutes," says marine biologist Tracy Mincer from Florida Atlantic University.

"We also found that there are attachment factors that microbes use to stick to plastics, and it is the same kind of mechanism that pathogens use."

A graph depicting the study's collection and analysis of bacteria in the Sargasso Sea. (Mincer et al., Water Research, 2023)

Previous studies have suggested that Vibrio pathogens are early colonizers of floating marine plastic, but Mincer and his colleagues at FAU are the first to sequence their genomes from a real-world sample.

The results suggest that Vibrio bacteria might be adapting to life on the open ocean in ways that could be dangerous to animal and human health. Some of the pathogens out in the blue might even be evolving toxic secretions, which can penetrate an animal's intestine to cause leaky gut syndrome.

"For instance," explains Mincer, "if a fish eats a piece of plastic and gets infected by this Vibrio, which then results in a leaky gut and diarrhea, it's going to release waste nutrients such nitrogen and phosphate that could stimulate Sargassum growth and other surrounding organisms."

Thanks to the widespread use of fertilizers, Sargassum seaweed in the Caribbean has begun to bloom in greater swathes than ever before, suffocating great stretches of beach in the process.

As a solution, some experts think we should convert the abundance to food or biofuel.

Until the risks are explored further, researchers warn we should hold off on harvesting the world's largest bloom of seaweed, as some have suggested.

Sargassum brown seaweed washed up on the beach in Belize. (hat3m/Pixabay)

As floating seaweed and plastic debris meet and mix in the ocean like never before, they could tangle up and trade microbes, leading to potentially dangerous health outcomes when they wash up on the beach.

Until we know the risks, researchers warn that Sargassum seaweed should not be touched.

"I don't think at this point, anyone has really considered these microbes and their capability to cause infections," says Mincer.

"We really want to make the public aware of these associated risks."

The study was published in Water Research.

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A team of researchers including Augusto Arias-Gallego at the University of Tübingen, Germany, has developed a device for mimicking the refractive errors of a nearsighted eye [1]. The team demonstrates the ability of this “artificial eye” to characterize the real-world performance of eyeglasses designed to slow the worsening of the condition in children. The team hopes that the insight gained with their system will aid in the development of more effective iterations of a potentially sight-saving technology. “By characterizing the prototype lenses in the lab, we can easily check if the designs are good candidates to slow myopia progression,” Arias-Gallego says. “That could help millions of children.”

Poor eyesight is on the rise. Today, one third of the world’s population suffers from some form of visual impairment, up from one fifth a decade ago. By 2050, estimates indicate that the fraction will increase to over one in two. The most common vision condition is nearsightedness, also known as myopia, which leads moderate sufferers unable to resolve objects more than a few feet away. When left untreated myopia can develop into sight-threatening conditions such as retinal detachment.

In order to see the world in all its razor-sharp glory, light entering the eye must focus on the back of the retina. In those with perfect vision, muscles around the lenses of their eyes tighten or relax, shaping the lens so that light converges on the retina. For those with myopia the light focuses at a point in front of the retina, making distant objects blurry.

Regular eyeglasses can fix this refractive error by shifting the focal point, but this adjustment only works for light that hits the center of the eye. Light around the periphery gets focused behind the retina, which can worsen myopia. “[Clinicians] think that focusing the image behind the retina promotes eye elongation, making the person more nearsighted” Arias-Gallego says. “And if the eye is still growing, this elongation can get worse and worse, which impacts the biomechanics of the eye and can lead to serious conditions that aren’t easily corrected.”

Various treatments exist for slowing the progression of myopia. These include drugs that help relax the muscles controlling the lens and special contact lenses that change the shape of the cornea. But those treatments can be tricky for young children who may resist having liquid or lenses put in their eyes. In addition, Arias-Gallego notes that the side effects of the drugs remain unclear and taking contact lenses in and out increases the chance of getting an eye infection. That is where myopia-correcting eyeglasses come in. “Specially designed spectacles are the safest myopia treatment and the least invasive,” Arias-Gallego says.

Myopia-correcting glasses work in the same way as regular ones, but they deal with peripheral light differently. In so-called DIMS lenses, the peripheral light is focused in front of the retina using microlenses. In DOT lenses, the peripheral light intensity is reduced using light-scattering elements called microdiffusers.

Scientists think the defocusing of DIMS lenses and the contrast reduction of DOT lenses both stimulate contraction of the eye, slowing eye growth and stopping myopia progression. But the exact mechanisms by which DIMS and DOT lenses work remain unknown, says Linda Lundström, who studies visual optics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. “The efficacies of [all myopia] interventions seem to be similar although the treatment mechanisms are different.”

To explore how the different treatments work, Arias-Gallego and his colleagues developed a method for characterizing the optical properties of myopia-correcting lenses using an artificial myopic eye. Their setup consists of a rotatable source that shines red light into a target lens from different angles. After passing through the lens, the light is directed into a spatial light modulator (SLM), which modifies the amplitude and phase of the incoming light before transmitting it to a detector. The team programmed the SLM so that it reproduced the refractive errors of a myopic eye.

The researchers studied the focusing and scattering properties of both types of myopia-correcting lenses. They found that both technologies defocused the light at the periphery with respect to the retina and reduced the light’s intensity at the periphery. This defocus was significantly greater for the DIMS lenses, which created sharper, brighter images in the periphery than the DOT lenses. They also found that for the DOT lenses, the contrast reduction depended on the amount of light striking the pupil, with a higher reduction seen under brighter conditions.

Further experiments and clinical trials are needed to determine whether this contrast dependence impacts the efficacy of the DOT lenses. In the meantime, the researchers are using their setup to characterize the eye’s response to updated versions of myopia-correcting lenses that are still in development. “We are already testing new prototypes,” Arias-Gallego says. Ultimately, Arias-Gallego and his colleagues hope that the insights gained from these experiments “will pave the way to more effective treatments,” he says.

–Katherine Wright

Katherine Wright is the Deputy Editor of Physics Magazine.

References

A. Arias et al., “In-depth optical characterization of spectacle lenses for myopia progression management,” Optica 10, 594 (2023).

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"Finding the best way to identify who is at risk for developing heart disease can help determine what needs to be done to lower their risk," said lead study author Dr. Sadiya Khan, an assistant professor of medicine and preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine cardiologist. "This finding can help doctors and patients in managing risk for heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the U.S."

Currently, conventional measures of risk-factor levels, such as blood pressure and cholesterol, are used by doctors to determine a person's likelihood of developing coronary heart disease or blockages of the arteries in the heart. But some people may experience a heart attack, or related heart problem, without one of those conventional factors picking it up.

Because the risk for heart disease can be inherited, scientists were optimistic that a person's genetics can inform who is at greatest risk, Khan said. It was posited that polygenic risk scores—a compilation of more than 6 million commonly occurring genetic variants associated with heart disease—could be used as a potential breakthrough for personalized medicine.

But the new Northwestern study directly compares genetics and CT scans for coronary artery calcium and demonstrates that the CT scan does a better job than genetics at predicting risk for heart disease in middle age.

"These findings support recommendations to consider CT screening to calculate risk for heart disease in middle-aged patients when their degree of risk is uncertain or in the intermediate range," Khan said.

The study used data from 3,208 adults from two cohort studies, one based in the U.S. and one in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Investigators used data on risk factors for heart disease (smoking status, cholesterol levels, blood pressure), genetics and CT scan data to estimate the risk of developing heart disease. The study follow-up of up to 17 years.

The investigators looked at how using either CT scans or polygenic risk scores affected the risk predicted of individuals based on conventional risk factors—blood pressure and cholesterol, and whether the addition of either of these markers (CT or genetics) put them in a different risk category. Low risk means someone has less than a 7.5% risk of developing heart disease in the next 10 years. If it's above 7.5%, statins are recommended.

Using genetic data did not affect a person's risk category based on their conventional risk factors (blood pressure and cholesterol.) But only when considering CT scan, half the study participants moved into high-risk group.

"The data from the CT scan can help identify individuals who may benefit from medications, such as statins, to reduce their risk of heart disease," Khan said.

Other Northwestern authors are Norrina Allen, Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones and Dr. Philip Greenland.

The title of the paper is, "Coronary Artery Calcium Score and Polygenic Risk Score for the Prediction of Coronary Heart Disease Events in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and the Rotterdam Study."

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The findings, published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology, could help get to the bottom of why limiting sugary foods can ease symptoms for patients with IBD.

"The prevalence of IBD is rising around the world, and it's rising the fastest in cultures with industrialized, urban lifestyles, which typically have diets high in sugar," said senior author Timothy Hand, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics and immunology at Pitt's School of Medicine and UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.

"Too much sugar isn't good for a variety of reasons, and our study adds to that evidence by showing how sugar may be harmful to the gut. For patients with IBD, high-density sugar—found in things like soda and candy—might be something to stay away from."

Led by Ansen Burr, Ph.D., a student in Pitt's Medical Scientist Training Program, the researchers started by feeding mice either a standard or high-sugar diet. Then they mimicked symptoms of IBD by treating the animals with a chemical called DSS that causes damage to the colon.

To their shock, all the mice on the high-sugar diet died within nine days. In contrast, all the animals on the standard diet survived until the end of the 14-day experiment.

To learn what made sugar so deadly in mice with IBD symptoms, the team looked at the animals' colons. Also known as the large intestine, the colon is lined with a layer of epithelial cells that are arranged in finger-like projections called crypts. In a healthy colon, these cells are continually replenished by dividing stem cells at the bottom of each crypt.

"The colon epithelium is like a conveyor belt," said Hand, who is also director of Pitt's Gnotobiotic Animal Core Laboratory. "It takes five days for cells to travel through the circuit from the bottom to the top of the crypt, where they are shed into the colon and defecated out. You essentially make a whole new colon every five days."

When mice on the high-sugar diet were given DSS, that circuit collapsed, said Hand. In some of the animals, the protective layer of epithelial cells was completely lost, causing the colon to be full of blood and immune cells.

Unexpectedly, a high-sugar diet was similarly lethal in germ-free mice treated with DSS, showing that sugar affects the colon directly and is not dependent on the gut microbiome as the researchers had predicted.

Next, the team tested how sugar affected mouse and human colonoids, poppy seed-sized miniature intestines that can be grown in a lab dish. As concentrations of glucose, sucrose or fructose increased, fewer colonoids developed and they grew slower, evidence that sugar impaired cell division.

"We found that stem cells were dividing much more slowly in the presence of sugar—likely too slow to repair damage to the colon," said Hand.

"The other strange thing we noticed was that the metabolism of the cells was different. These cells usually prefer to use fatty acids, but after being grown in high-sugar conditions, they seemed to get locked into using sugar."

In sugary conditions, the cells had vastly altered metabolic pathways, and they produced lower levels of ATP, the energy-providing molecule that drives cellular processes. The researchers suspect that this rewiring of cellular pathways inhibits the capacity of stem cells to divide, slowing renewal of the colon lining and accelerating gut damage in IBD.

According to Hand, these findings could help explain other research that has linked sweetened beverages, including sodas, soft drinks and juices, to negative outcomes in IBD patients.

"If you eat an apple or an orange, you're eating a lot of sugar, but that sugar is tied up in the fruit's cells, so it takes a long time to digest and open up those cells to get the sugar," said Hand. "Whereas if you drink a soda, the sugar is available almost the second it hits your intestine, and it's easy to drink a huge amount of sugar in a very short time. Our research suggests that consuming high levels of sugar could have negative outcomes for repairing the colon in patients with inflammatory bowel disease."

Hand said that future research, done in in collaboration with co-author Semir Beyaz, Ph.D., assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, will focus on understanding how diet and immune response can affect IBD.

"I think that we need to investigate more deeply what diets are going to benefit patients who have intestinal damage, whether that be from IBD or from radiation therapy to treat colon cancer," said Hand. "It's about a nutraceutical approach to colon damage, or the idea of finding the right diet for a particular patient."

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The continued lack of a consistent approach on back pain treatment, and limited treatment options have researchers concerned that this will lead to a healthcare crisis, as low back pain is the leading cause of disability in the world.

In Australia, there will be a nearly 50 percent increase in cases by 2050. The landscape of back pain cases is set to shift, with the biggest increases in back pain cases to be in Asia and Africa.

The findings are published in The Lancet Rheumatology.

"Our analysis paints a picture of growing low back pain cases globally, putting enormous pressure on our healthcare system. We need to establish a national, consistent approach to managing low back pain that is informed by research," says lead author, Professor Manuela Ferreira from Sydney Musculoskeletal Health, an initiative of the University of Sydney, Sydney Local Health District and Northern Sydney Local Health District.

"Currently, how we have been responding to back pain has been reactive. Australia is a global leader in back pain research; we can be proactive and lead by example on back pain prevention," said Professor Ferreira who is based at Sydney's Kolling Institute.

The study reveals several milestones in back pain cases. Since 2017, the number of low back pain cases has ticked over to more than half a billion people.

In 2020, there were approximately 619 million cases of back pain.

At least one third of the disability burden associated with backpain was attributable to occupational factors, smoking and being overweight.

A widespread misconception is that low back pain mostly affects adults of working age. But researchers say this study has confirmed that low back pain is more common among older people. Low back pain cases were also higher among females compared to males.

This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date available data that includes for the first time global projections and the contribution of GBD risk factors to low back pain. The work was made possible by the joint efforts of The University of Sydney, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington's School of Medicine (healthdata.org), IHME's international collaborators, and the Global Alliance for Musculoskeletal Health (gmusc.com).

"We also know that most available data come from high-income countries, making it sometimes hard to interpret these results for low to mid-income countries. We urgently need more population-based back pain and musculoskeletal data from countries of low to mid-income," said senior author Professor Lyn March from Sydney Musculoskeletal Health and the Kolling Institute.

The study analyzed GBD data from 1990 to 2020 from over 204 countries and territories to map the landscape of back pain cases over time. The GBD is the most comprehensive picture of mortality and disability across countries, time, age, and

It is also the first study to be used for modeling the future prevalence of back pain cases.

"Health systems need to respond to this enormous and rising burden of low back pain that is affecting people globally. Much more needs to be done to prevent low back pain and ensure timely access to care, as there are effective ways of helping people in pain" said Prof Anthony Woolf, co-chair of the Global Alliance for Musculoskeletal Health which is calling for priority to be given to addressing the growing burden of musculoskeletal conditions.

"Ministries of health cannot continue ignoring the high prevalence of musculoskeletal conditions including low back pain. These conditions have important social and economic consequences, especially considering the cost of care. Now is the time to learn about effective strategies to address the high burden and to act" said Dr. Alarcos Cieza, Unit Head, World Health Organization, Headquarters, Geneva.

National guidelines will form basis of back pain prevention

In 2018, experts (independent to this study) voiced their concerns in The Lancet and gave recommendations, especially regarding exercise and education, about the need for a change in global policy on the best way to prevent and manage low back pain to stop the rise of inappropriate treatments.

However, since then, there has been little change. Common treatments recommended for low back pain have been found to have unknown effectiveness or to be ineffective—this includes some surgeries and opioids.

Professor Ferreira says there is a lack of consistency in how health professionals manage back pain cases and how the healthcare system needs to adapt.

"It may come as a surprise to some that current clinical guidelines for back pain treatment and management do not provide specific recommendations for older people."

"Older people have more complex medical histories and are more likely to be prescribed strong medication, including opioids for back pain management, compared to younger adults. But this is not ideal and can have a negative impact on their function and quality of life, especially as these analgesics may interfere with their other existing medications. This is just one example of why we need to update clinical guidelines to support our health professionals."

Co-author Dr. Katie de Luca, from CQUniversity, said if the right action is not taken, low back pain can become a precursor to chronic health conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and mental health conditions, invasive medical procedures, and significant disability.

"Low back pain continues to be the greatest cause of disability burden worldwide. There are substantial socio-economic consequences of this condition, and the physical and personal impact directly threatens healthy aging."

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You may have an allergy, but you're not alone. More than 50 million adults and children in the United States have a bad reaction to pollen, dust, mold, pet dander and other common allergens, according to the American College of Allergy, Asthma, & Immunology (ACAAI).

What are allergies (allergic reactions)?

An allergy is your body's reaction to an allergen such as pollen, mold and more. Pollen causes a pollen allergy and mold causes a mold allergy.

It's your immune system that reacts. It is very important because it protects you from germs and viruses, but sometimes it gets confused. "Most people don't have an immune response to pollen, but a certain percentage of people's immune systems see it as foreign and dangerous, and they treat it like a pathogen or infection," said Dr. Christina Price, an allergist and immunologist at Yale Medicine in New Haven, Conn.

How your body treats allergens

When your immune system decides that something might hurt you, it fights back. This fight triggers those miserable symptoms like shortness of breath, hives, sneezing and itching, the ACAAI explains. In other words, while trying to protect you, your body accidentally causes harm.

The most common allergy symptoms

Be aware of the different types of allergies and talk about them with your health care provider. He or she needs to know what symptoms you're experiencing to figure out the type of allergy you have (and how to help you cope).

Seasonal allergies and symptoms

A seasonal allergy (allergic rhinitis) is one that happens only during a certain time of year (summer, fall, winter or spring). Yale Medicine notes that the most common seasonal allergens are grass pollen, tree pollen, mold and ragweed. The most common symptom of seasonal and pollen allergy include:

•     Congestion (fluid in your nose)

•     Coughing

•     Fatigue

•     Itchy eyes, nose and throat

•     Post-nasal drip (drainage in your throat)

•     Runny nose and eyes

•    Sneezing

Some seasonal allergies have been worse in recent years, according to Dr. Stephanie Leeds, a pediatric allergist at Yale Medicine.

"With climate change, the general trend has been that we're getting higher levels of pollen and longer pollen seasons, whether that's due to warmer temperatures or increased carbon dioxide emissions," she said. "It's probably multifactorial."

Perennial allergies and symptoms

A perennial allergy can happen during any season of the year. The most common perennial allergens are pet hair and dander, dust mites, cockroaches and molds, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Cat and dog allergies

Cat allergy symptoms and dog allergy symptoms are likely to include the following, according to ACAAI:

•     Chest tightness
•     Coughing
•     Eyes that are watery, red or itchy
•     Hives (bumps or red marks on your skin)
•     Pain around your face (caused by congestion in your nose)
•     Runny or stuffy nose
•     Shortness of breath
•     Skin rashes
•     Sneezing
•     Wheezing (you'll hear a rattle or whistle when you breathe)

There are easy ways to avoid pet allergies. But, getting away from the fur and dander may be more complicated than you expect.

"If you remove a cat from a home, you clean all the walls down, do the laundry, do the draperies, it still takes six months for the level of cat protein to get down to normal," said allergist Dr. Warner Carr, an allergist at Children's Hospital of Orange County Mission Hospital in Orange, Calif.

Mold allergy symptoms

Mold allergy symptoms, according to ACAAI, are likely to include:

•     Congestion (fluid in your nose)
•     Coughing
•     Irritated eyes
•     Itchy throat
•     Runny nose
•     Sneezing
•     Wheezing (you'll hear a rattle or whistle when you breathe)

Food allergy symptoms

The most common food allergens include gluten, egg and milk. You can also be allergic to shellfish, peanuts, tree nuts, soybeans and wheat, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, gluten allergy symptoms (gluten intolerance) are likely to include:

•     Abdominal (tummy) pain
•     Anemia (too few red blood cells)
•     Anxiety
•     Bloating
•     Brain fog
•     Constipation
•     Depression
•     Diarrhea
•     Fatigue (severe tiredness)
•     Gas
•     Headache
•     Joint pain
•     Nausea
•     Rash
•     Trouble concentrating
•     Vomiting

According to Mayo Clinic, egg allergy symptoms are likely to include:

•     Chest tightness
•     Congestion (fluid in your nose)
•     Coughing
•     Hives (bumps or red marks on your skin)
•     Runny nose
•     Shortness of breath
•     Skin inflammation (swelling, heat, redness, pain)
•     Sneezing
•     Stomach cramps
•     Nausea
•     Vomiting
•     Wheezing

According to Mayo Clinic, symptoms of allergy to milk and other dairy products are likely to include:

•     Abdominal (tummy) cramps
•     Colic (babies only)
•     Coughing
•     Diarrhea (you may see blood)
•     Hives (bumps or red marks on your skin)
•     Itching around your mouth, lips
•     Runny nose
•     Shortness of breath
•     Swelling in your throat, lips tongue
•     Tingling around your mouth, lips
•     Vomiting
•     Watery eyes
•     Wheezing

No matter how long your allergy lasts or how bad it gets, know that you don't have to just live with the symptoms.

"Some people have a couple of weeks when they are miserable, and then the rest of the year they are fine, so they think they'll just grin and bear it," Leeds said. "But there is a better way. You can take steps to minimize those weeks of misery." Discuss your symptoms with your health care provider.

If you think you're having an allergic reaction, Mayo Clinic urges you to call emergency services or go to the emergency department right away if you experience any of the following life-threatening symptoms:

•     Fainting, dizziness, unconsciousness
•     Pulse is quick and weak
•     Skin changes (hives, itching, redness)
•     Smaller (narrower) airway
•     Swelling (eyes, face, throat, lips)
•     Trouble breathing
•     Trouble swallowing
•     Vomiting, nausea, diarrhea
•     Wheezing (you'll hear a rattle or whistle when you breathe)

Copyright © 2023 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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There is a mental-health crisis in science — at all career stages and across the world. Graduate students are being harassed and discriminated against, paid meagre wages, bullied, overworked and sometimes sexually assaulted. It doesn’t get much better for early-career researchers struggling to land long-term employment. And established senior researchers face immense pressure to win grants, publish in high-profile journals and maintain their reputations in highly competitive fields.

Scientists have raised concerns for years about the impacts of all these pressures on mental health. But a series of studies in the past few years are now providing hard data. And the findings show that the situation is dire.

Researchers are much more likely than the general population to experience depression and anxiety. And although the COVID-19 pandemic caused an increase in mental-health struggles, many argue that it only exacerbated problems that were already present. The recent studies, which have collectively surveyed tens of thousands of researchers worldwide, suggest that scientists’ mental-health struggles are a direct result of a toxic research culture.

That is particularly true for members of under-represented groups, including women, non-binary individuals, people of colour, those from sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQ+) and students on low incomes. But they also affect senior researchers and scientists in different countries.

“Well-being and how to set healthy boundaries in your life and in your work is a fundamental skill,” says Sharon Milgram, director of the Office of Intramural Training and Education at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). “I feel like there was a blind spot in myself and many of us, in that it took this data to wake us up.”

With hard numbers in hand, some argue that science is at the beginning of a movement — one that will encourage systemic changes to improve the mental health of researchers over generations to come. Others argue that change is happening too slowly for young scientists who are already fleeing science — an effect that could have grim consequences for the future of research and society itself.

A global problem

In 2015, Teresa Evans, who directed graduate biomedical career development at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, learnt that her students were struggling. But when they came to her for advice, she felt ill-equipped to help.

So Evans started her own research, only to uncover a dearth of literature on the topic. Not only were there few resources on how to help students, but it was unclear how extensive mental-health problems were — compelling Evans to circulate her own survey to quantify the matter. She received 2,279 responses, mostly from PhD candidates, at 234 institutions across 26 countries.

The results, published in March 2018, represented the largest survey of its kind at the time. It revealed a global problem: 41% of respondents reported moderate to severe anxiety and 39% had moderate to severe depression1. Those levels are six times greater than in the general population (see ‘Struggles in science’). The data also suggested possible sources of these mental-health problems — anxiety and depression were often correlated with poor work–life balance and poor mentor relationships.

Sources: Left, Ref. 1; Right: Ref. 9

The rates varied significantly by gender: female, transgender and gender-nonconforming respondents were more likely to struggle with mental health than were their male counterparts. The prevalence of anxiety and depression was 55% and 57% for transgender and gender-nonconforming graduate students, 43% and 41% for women and 34% and 35% for men. That didn’t surprise Evans, because women are more prone to anxiety and depression than are men2.

But there was another, bigger factor at work: sexual harassment in science that disproportionately affects women. In 2014, Kathryn Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, documented high rates of sexual harassment in field science3 . Then, in 2017, she and her colleagues surveyed 474 astronomers and planetary scientists, and found that 30% of women felt unsafe because of their gender (compared with 2% of men)4.

These studies encouraged the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to appoint a special committee to examine the issue in academic settings. In June 2018, it released a report that revealed pervasive and damaging sexual harassment in science5 (see ‘Sexual harassment of female students’).

Source: Ref. 5

It’s not just a problem in the United States. In 2020, Wellcome, a major biomedical research funder in London, surveyed more than 4,200 scientists from 87 countries across genders, career stages and disciplines, and found that 43% of participants had experienced bullying or harassment and 61% had witnessed it6 (see ‘Epidemic of bullying’). Many felt that it was “culturally systemic”, and 33% thought that leaders turned a blind eye to the behaviour.

Source: Ref. 6

In a 2021 Nature survey of more than 3,200 working scientists, nearly one-third said they had observed discrimination against or harassment of colleagues in their current job. The following year, another Nature survey of more than 3,200 PhD and master’s students found that 35% of scientists who identify as members of minority racial or ethnic groups said they had experienced harassment or discrimination during their graduate studies.

It’s no wonder there is a serious mental-health problem in science, say researchers. One study even found that the rates of burnout, depression and anxiety were comparable with those reported in ‘high-risk’ occupations such as health care7.

The Wellcome study6 found that 70% of respondents felt stressed on the average workday, and 34% had sought professional help for mental-health issues. Beyond harassment, many participants blamed funders and institutes that emphasize quantity over quality in terms of publishing and obtaining grants — all of which contribute to a poor work–life balance.

Another explanation suggested in the study6 is that many scientists see their work as a vocation, not just a job. Although that means researchers are passionate, it also presents a unique challenge, argues Eric Pellegrini, an astronomer who left the field last year to become an independent data scientist. “They get you to torture yourself by making this work part of your identity — it’s not a job, it’s not even a career, it’s a life choice,” he says. “And you buy into that for years until you figure out what it is. Take away a lot of the parts, make it more generic, and it’s just an abusive relationship.”

Pandemic pressures

That was the picture before 2020. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and with it, an onslaught of further challenges.

In a 2020 survey of 5,247 graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics from 9 institutions across the United States, 38% reported symptoms consistent with anxiety and 35% had depression8. These proportions represented large jumps from what the same team found in 2019. The number of students with depression doubled, and the prevalence of anxiety rose by 50%8.

“Our findings indicated that it was really a disaster,” says Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study.

Postdoctoral researchers and other academics demand higher salaries and better benefits during a strike against the University of California last December.

Credit: Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News/Getty

Chirikov’s team found that challenges in mental health were often associated with financial stress, which are acute for early-stage researchers. In the United States, for example, PhD students in the biological sciences earn salaries that are well below the cost of living. Postdoctoral researchers earn an average of $47,500 a year — a little more than half of the average annual salary for university graduates. Moreover, postdocs face constant upheaval, because they typically have to move to a new role every few years. Some researchers spend a decade or longer jumping from one short-term contract to the next.

Then, despite the years that scientists devote to training, many struggle to find a long-term job at a university, and this can drive young researchers out of science entirely. The 2020 Wellcome survey66 found that nearly half of the respondents who had left research reported that difficulty in finding a job was one reason. The two other common reasons included a negative impact on mental health and a desire for a better work–life balance.

Even if scientists land permanent positions, the competition never ends. In 2020, a survey designed by Cactus Communications, a science communication and technology company headquartered in Mumbai, India, analysed the opinions of 13,000 researchers in more than 160 countries. It found, for example, that 65% of respondents were under tremendous pressure to publish papers, secure grants and complete projects to maintain their reputation in the research community9. “That response is coming largely from more senior researchers, because they need to continue to be seen as bright as they once were,” says Abhishek Goel, co-founder and chief executive of Cactus Communications.

Beyond the pressure to perform, the study identified several other factors contributing to poor mental health among researchers, including long working hours and a culture in which stress and anxiety are normalized. Another factor mentioned by a large proportion of scientists was bullying and discrimination in their work environment. This was especially common for women, researchers identifying as gay and people of mixed race. Some 60% of the last group, for example, reported that they had experienced discrimination, harassment or bullying at work.

Although the study took place in 2020, most of these issues were present well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

One study, for example, surveyed more than 3,000 physicists and biologists in the United Kingdom, United States, Italy and India, and conducted in-depth interviews with more than 200 scientists. It found that the pandemic only exacerbated issues that were already present10.

“In our interviews, scientists said that the pandemic was really just the tipping point,” says study co-author Brandon Vaidyanathan, a sociologist at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. “Things like burnout and emotional exhaustion had been happening beforehand and the pandemic laid them bare. It amplified these effects.”

Chance to change

As evidence of all these problems has grown, scientists are turning towards solutions. But exactly what needs to change is far from clear. “When we looked at the results from the study, we were actually quite upset and felt a little angry — helpless even,” Goel says. “We just felt that it would be extremely difficult to effect change.”

Still, many scientists agree that the first step is for mental health to become a mainstream topic of conversation — a change that might already be afoot. Since Evans and her colleagues published their study in 2018, they and other scientists have been invited to numerous institutions and conferences to talk about the issue. And the most recent decadal survey of US astronomy and astrophysics, in 2021, conducted by the National Academies to set funding priorities every decade, discussed the need to address harassment and discrimination in the community.

That’s huge progress, argued Jennifer Wiseman, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington, in January. Other programmes are looking to tackle the representation and equity issues that so often coincide with harassment, abuse and mental illness. For instance, NASA recently reviewed its Hubble Fellowship Program, which provides esteemed postdoctoral positions, in order to diversify its reach. Major grant programmes, such as those of the US Department of Energy, now require a plan that outlines how the proposing team will work against barriers to create and sustain an inclusive work environment. “These examples highlight actions being taken in our astronomical field in response to shifting values that now prioritize inclusivity and the well-being of our communities as central to scientific success,” Wiseman said at the meeting.

Milgram has long viewed mental health as an essential component of a successful researcher’s skill set. Since 2020, the NIH Office of Intramural Training and Education has offered a course called Becoming a Resilient Scientist, with topics that range from impostor syndrome to developing better relationships with mentors. Its 25,000 participants — including undergraduates, graduates, postdocs and medical students recruited from the NIH and various extramural institutions — have reported decreases in anxiety, depression and presenteeism (that is, not fully functioning in the workplace because of stress). In the past two years, Milgram’s team has offered a parallel programme called Raising a Resilient Scientist, which is designed to help faculty members and administrators develop better mentoring skills and work on their personal mental health.

Grassroots initiatives by graduate students and postdocs have led to various events and workshops, even yoga meet-ups. Drives to form PhD student and postdoc unions on US campuses have also sought guarantees of better working conditions. “It is the beginning of a movement that hopefully over generations of academics will result in long-term change,” Evans says. “And I feel like we have all the pieces to see that happen. It just takes time.”

But others argue that science needs larger, systemic changes — such as zero tolerance for abuse. Although institutions and conferences are strengthening value statements, codes of conduct and enforcement, there is still a lot of work to be done, Wiseman said at the AAS meeting. Researchers need to be able to raise concerns without fear of reprisals or prejudice. In Goel’s survey9, for example, 49% of respondents said that they would not seek support because they would worry about retaliation.

Many argue that there needs to be drastic changes to funding structures. “These models are just really dated,” says Sheila Kanani, the education outreach and diversity officer at the Royal Astronomical Society in London, which surveyed 650 astronomers and physicists in 2020 and found a systemic bullying problem. “The whole system needs a massive overhaul.” As part of that, she and others say that funding should not be entirely based on publications, but rather on a healthy work environment — one that considers the mental health of researchers and the rigour of their work, including ideas that might never land in an academic journal.

Without dramatic change, it’s possible that young researchers will continue to flee the field. “This really is a problem that could potentially affect the future of science if we can’t retain young talent,” Vaidyanathan says. “We owe it to future generations of scientists to create more hospitable workplaces that just allow you to just do the science.”

Nature 617, 666-668 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01708-4

References

1.  Evans, T. M., Bira, L., Gastelum, J. B., Weiss, L. T. & Vanderford, N. L. Nature Biotechnol. 36, 282–284 (2018).

2.  Eaton, N. R. et al. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 121, 282–288 (2012).

3.  Clancy, K. B. H., Nelson, R. G., Rutherford, J. N. & Hinde, K. PLoS ONE 9, e102172 (2014).

4. Clancy, K. B. H., Lee, K. M. N., Rodgers, E. M. & Richey, C. J. Geophys. Res. Planets 122, 1610–1623 (2017).

 5.  Johnson, P. A., Widnall, S. E. & Benya, F. F. (eds). Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (National Academies Press, 2018).

6.  Wellcome. What Researchers Think About the Culture They Work In (Wellcome, 2020).

 
7.  Watts, J. & Robertson, N. Educ. Res. 53, 33–50 (2011).

  
8.  Chirikov, I., Soria, K. M, Horgos, B. & Jones-White, D. Undergraduate and Graduate Students’ Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Univ. California, Berkeley & Univ. Minnesota, 2020).

9.  Cactus Foundation. Joy and Stress Triggers: A Global Survey on Mental Health Among Researchers (Cactus Communications, 2020).

10.  Jacobi, C. J., Varga, P. J. & Vaidyanathan, B. Front. Psychol. 13, 923940 (2022).

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The Oceanbird Wing 560 isn’t a wing, but it isn’t a sail either. When it’s first assembled a few months from now in a shipyard just north of Malmö, Sweden, it’ll be 40 meters high with a 560-square-meter surface and will weigh around 200 metric tons. Its creators call it a wingsail, and they think it’s the future of sea travel.

“It’s more like an airplane wing that you put on top of a ship rather than a normal sail, that’s why we call it a wingsail,” says Niclas Dhal, managing director of Oceanbird.

The wingsail consists of two parts: a rigid main core and a flap that draws air onto the core in a system inspired by high-performance racing yachts, which can travel faster than the speed of the wind. The core is made of steel, surrounded by glass fibre and recycled PET, and the whole thing can contract to less than half of its total length and tilt down to lie flat over the deck. This summer, its prototype will be tested on land, and next year it will be fitted to a 14-year-old cargo ship, the car carrier Wallenius Tirranna.

Making the sail work on a vessel that’s already in service is critical for a company that wants to help decarbonize the shipping industry, which is responsible for just under 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Building more fuel-efficient ships is the long-term mission, Dhal says, “but if you really want to change the world, you need to address all the existing vessels.”

Oceanbird started in 2010 as a zero-emissions research project at Wallenius Marine, a large Swedish shipbuilder. It is now a separate commercial entity, designing and producing wingsails.

A vessel retrofitted with an Oceanbird wingsail.

Courtesy of Oceanbird

Retrofitting an existing vessel with a single wingsail can reduce fuel consumption by around 10 percent, Oceanbird says, but a ship entirely designed around these sails is far more efficient. The first one—the Orcelle Wind, a car carrier with space for 7,000 vehicles and a length of over 200 meters—won’t sail before 2026, but it will cut emissions by at least 60 percent over an equivalent vessel without a sail. The technology can achieve even more—up to 90 percent—if compromises are made in terms of routing and cruise speed, resulting in a longer travel time.

International shipping carries around 90 percent of the world’s trade goods. Its emissions are only going to rise as trade increases. But most large ships still rely on diesel engines, meaning that more trade translates to greater emissions.

In 2018, the International Maritime Organization adopted a target to reduce total greenhouse emissions 50 percent by 2050 compared to 2008 levels. “That’s of course not enough by any measure to meet the temperature targets that are in the Paris Agreement,” says Christiaan De Beukelaer, a lecturer in Culture & Climate at the University of Melbourne and author of Trade Winds, a book about the shipping industry’s climate impact.

The target is up for revision in July: “Unless something very unexpected happens, I would assume that the level of ambition will increase quite drastically and the target will become zero emissions by 2050,” De Beukelaer adds. “We’re currently burning 300 million tonnes of fossil fuels in the shipping industry every single year, and that will double or triple by 2050.”

Lower-emission fuels, such as methanol or ammonia, are available, but it’s unlikely that their production can be scaled up quickly enough to meet the global demand, which means fuel consumption must be reduced, De Beukelaer says. Wind, which has powered shipping for thousands of years, can help: “The physics of sailing are age-old and haven’t changed, but the way in which we’re able to do it has come a very long way because we’ve been able to draw lessons from all kinds of technological advancements that have happened over the past 150 years.”

Among them is AI modeling that optimizes routing based on weather data, offsetting the wind’s unpredictability: “But a lot of the major trade routes that we use around the world still align quite well with the trade winds of yesteryear,” De Beukelaer says. “The major trading connections and ports have been set up when we only used sails. That’s where big cities and powerful economies developed. So to a great extent those connections are still well served by winds.”

Courtesy of Oceanbird

There are limitations, such as choke points like the Suez and Panama canals: “Neither of them allows vessels to operate under sail. The Panama Canal also has a bridge over it, with a height limitation of around 50 meters,” De Beukelaer says. And of course, not all ships adapt well to sails. Container ships, for example, have little space on deck to mount them, in contrast to car carriers or bulk carriers, which tuck away their load in the cargo hold—leaving plenty of available surface—and don’t require cranes for unloading.

According to the IMO, there are seven categories of wind propulsion technologies, which can apply to virtually every type of ship. While Oceanbird uses hard sails, there are also soft sails, resembling those most associated with classic sailboats, but with more advanced materials.

For large ships, rotor sails (also called Flettner rotors, after their inventor) will be a popular option. These are composite cylinders that rotate up to 300 times per second, generating thrust due to a pressure differential. The similar looking suction wings or turbosails, developed by explorer Jacques Cousteau in the 1980s, do not rotate, relying instead on internal fans that create a suction effect. There are also giant kites, usually deployed about 200 meters above the ship, and wind turbines, not too different from those used to generate electricity but mounted on deck with the option of providing power or thrust. Finally there’s a hull form, in which the entire ship is essentially designed as a large sail to capture the wind.

About 25 large, wind-powered cargo ships are already operating worldwide, with most of these technologies represented: “The rotor sails have the most installations, one of the reasons being that they started to commercialize earlier than the other ones,” says Gavin Allwright, secretary general of the International Windship Association, a nonprofit organization founded in 2014 that promotes wind propulsion in commercial shipping. “Back then, the whole policy framework of shipping revolved around fossil fuels. To get wind accepted and included into that is an ongoing challenge, but we’re increasingly seeing that happen: By the end of this year, we should have 48, possibly 49 wind-powered vessels, bringing us up to possibly 3.5 million deadweight tonnes of shipping.”

That’s a minuscule percentage of the world’s global capacity of 2.2 billion deadweight metric tons, as wind technology is still expensive in this nascent phase. “We’re still in pretty early days, but for every doubling of installations, we see a 10 percent reduction in costs,” says Allwright. “However, 2023 will likely get more like a 20 or 25 percent [savings], because those early reductions in costs are the easy, low-hanging fruit.”

Among other factors that could accelerate uptake, Allwright says, are streamlining the certification process for new wind-powered ships, as well possibly higher costs of fuel, which could be impacted by new carbon taxes like the one the European Union has agreed to introduce in 2024. Another key enabler would be the acceptance of slower shipping times. According to IMO estimates, simply adding wind propulsion to a single ship could lower emissions by more than 22 percent. However, extending trip duration by a fifth increases that to nearly 50 percent, and extending it by a half reduces emissions by 67 percent. A study by the University of Manchester similarly shows that cuts in emissions jump from 10 percent to 44 percent on a ship with rotor sails when speed is reduced and a flexible arrival time is allowed.

“The current operating model of a lot of shipping industries is that you hurry up, you get to port as quickly as possible, but then you have to wait for a slot to offload. And then, often, the cargo you’ve offloaded is left to wait before it’s picked up,” De Beukelaer says. “But in recent years there’s been a real interest in the so-called virtual arrival, where ports and shipping companies collaborate by aligning their slots in docks so the port can, for example, ask a ship to arrive later if there’s a backlog, which also means they’ll save fuel. Is there a possibility to make shipping times slightly longer? It might just require us to rethink the current ‘just in time’ logistics model and force us to accept a slightly more dynamic one, which could be tricky.”

According to Allwright, the time might be right for that kind of shift: “The boardroom of shipping has gone through quite a transformation over the last few years. They get the climate issue, they get the problem of pollution and the need for change.”

“But they also have to give value to their shareholders, and one of the big things with wind is that it’s a free energy source,” he adds. “It’s a propulsion system that will actually pay for itself, and it’s the only one out there that’s credible.”

Massive Sails Power Ships Like Never Before

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France is preparing for temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels in the country by century's end as the world falls short in meeting climate change targets, a cabinet minister warned Sunday.

Christophe Bechu, minister for ecological transition, told the weekly JDD paper that his government was no longer banking on limiting the increase to 1.5 Celsius or at least well below 2.0 Celsius as agreed in the landmark 2015 Paris climate treaty.

Instead, the most optimistic scenario for 2100 was now 2 degrees for metropolitan France, but twice that was more likely.

"Unless all the world's states intensify their efforts to cut emissions further still, we are on track for global warming of between +2.8 and +3.2 degrees on average, which means +4 degrees for France because Europe is warming fast," Bechu said.

The government was calling that scenario "pessimistic". But Bechu said "in truth we should call it realistic", and that French efforts at adaptation should be based on the 4 degrees outlook, which France should prepare for.

Bechu is set on Tuesday to launch a public consultation to help define the French government's climate change roadmap and strategy for adaptation, as well as outline further efforts at greenhouse gas reduction.

"We can't escape the global reality of global warming," the minister said in a statement, also published Sunday.

"We will therefore have to prepare concretely for its unavoidable effects on our country and our lives," the statement said. "This is why we want to give our country a clear adaptation trajectory."

Last year was the hottest year on record in France, with records going back to 1900.

Bechu said France could face heatwaves lasting two months at a time if temperatures rise by 4 degrees, and some southern parts of the country might see up to 90 nights per year with sweltering tropical temperatures.

Droughts and extreme rainfall would also become commonplace.

© Agence France-Presse

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Hypersensitive robot hand is eerily human in how it can feel things

SpaceX launches 10th crewed mission, third fully commercial flight

While water ice has been detected in the Main Belt of asteroids, its vapor has been strangely missing until now. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, we know water is in the asteroid belt.

The water is ejected by one of the rare comets in the Main Belt, an object known as Comet 238P/Read, revealing that water from the time of the Solar System's formation has been preserved there. Scientists had thought conditions might be too close to the Sun for much ice to remain.

The discovery also confirms that asteroid belt objects could have helped deliver water to Earth while the Solar System was still young and that Main Belt comets have enough ice for the outgassing that results when that ice sublimates under the Sun's warmth. Previously, only dust, not vapor outgassing, had been detected emanating from Main Belt comets.

"Since the discovery of main-belt comets, we have collected a substantial body of evidence that their activity is produced by sublimation, but until now, it has all been indirect," says planetary scientist Henry Hsieh of the Planetary Science Institute in the US.

"This new result from JWST represents the first direct evidence of sublimation in the form of water outgassing – or outgassing of any kind – from a main-belt comet, following studies dating back to 2008 to detect outgassing in main-belt comets using some of the biggest ground-based telescopes in the world."

JWST's image of Comet Read. (NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Kelley/University of Maryland, H. Hsieh/Planetary Science Institute, A. Pagan/STScI)

Most of the objects in the asteroid belt are, unsurprisingly, asteroids, and these are relatively inert chunks of rock that just hang out in space. Comets, by contrast, are defined by their activity, which is also largely affected by their icy, dusty compositions.

They usually swing around the Sun on large, elliptical orbits that carry them from the outer Solar System. The ice inside them sublimates as they get close to the Sun (called a perihelion), creating a dusty, gassy atmosphere and long tails that stream away from the Sun.

There aren't many comets that we've detected in the Main Belt, but because they're so close to the Sun, relatively speaking, scientists weren't sure if they had enough frozen material to produce the sublimation seen in comets that come from greater distances.

Although Comet Read's orbit is entirely within the asteroid belt, that's still a relatively broad swath of the Solar System to move around, and the object still has a perihelion. During this part of its orbit, a team led by astronomer Michael Kelley of the University of Maryland used JWST to study it closely for signs of outgassing.

The orbit of Comet Read is in pale blue, with the orbit of Comet Halley for contrast. (Henry Hsieh/Planetary Science Institute)

Using the telescope's near-infrared spectrograph, the researchers captured and analyzed the spectrum of light from the fuzzy haze that appeared around the comet during perihelion. Sure enough, the peaks in the spectrum revealed not just outgassing but the outgassing of water.

"In the past, we've seen objects in the main belt with all the characteristics of comets, but only with this precise spectral data from JWST can we say yes, it's definitely water ice that is creating that effect," Kelley explains.

"With JWST's observations of Comet Read, we can now demonstrate that water ice from the early Solar System can be preserved in the asteroid belt."

Oddly, something was missing. In a stark and puzzling contrast to other comets in the Solar System, in which carbon dioxide typically forms around 10 to 20 percent of their volatile substances, the researchers could detect no carbon dioxide wafting off Comet Read.

This compositional anomaly has two potential explanations, given that carbon dioxide ice sublimes more easily than water ice. One explanation is that the comet did have carbon dioxide but lost it all while retaining some water ice. Another is that the place in the Solar System where Comet Read formed was too warm for carbon dioxide, so it just never had any to start with.

Future work may be required to explore the likelihood of these possibilities. But the answers delivered by Comet Read have also given astronomers a lot to mull over.

"Water in main-belt comets is important because objects from the main asteroid belt have been proposed as a potential source of Earth's water in the early Solar System, where the modern-day Man-Belt comets appear to provide an opportunity to test this hypothesis," Hsieh says.

"This only works, though, if they do, in fact, contain water ice. The confirmation of water outgassing in at least one main-belt comet confirms that learning about the origin of Earth's water from main-belt comets is a viable possibility."

The findings have been published in Nature.

Source

Many of the food images are uploaded to sell specific foods. The idea is that the images on Facebook or Instagram will make us yearn for a McDonald's burger, for example. In other words, the image awakens our hunger.

New research from Aarhus University now shows that the images can actually have the opposite effect. At least if we see pictures of the same product repeatedly.

A number of experiments reveal that we can get a sense of satiety if we see the same image more 30 times. Tjark Andersen, who recently defended his Ph.D. at Department of Food Science at Aarhus University, explains more.

"In our experiments, we showed that when the participants saw the same food picture 30 times, they felt more satiated than before they had seen the picture. The participants who were shown the picture many times also chose a smaller portion than those who had only seen the picture three times, when we subsequently asked about the size of portion they wanted," he says.

Tricking your brain into feeling full

It may sound strange that the participants felt full without actually eating anything. But this is really quite natural, explains Tjark Andersen. How we think about food has a large influence on our appetite.

"Your appetite is more closely linked with your cognitive perception than most of us think. How we think about our food is very important," he says. "Studies have shown that if you make people aware of different colors of Jelly Beans, even if they have eaten all they can in red Jelly Beans, will still want the yellow ones. Even if both colors taste completely the same."

Within brain research, these findings are explained with so-called grounded cognition theory. For example, if you imagine putting your teeth in a juicy apple, the same areas of the brain are stimulated as if you actually take a bite of an apple.

"You will receive a physiological response to something you have only thought about. That's why we can feel fully satisfied without eating anything," he says.

Overview of the three studies and their contribution toward the overall aims. Credit: Appetite (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2022.106421

A large online experiment

Tjark Andersen and his colleagues are not the first to discover that we can get feel full by looking at pictures of food. Other research groups have previously shown this.

The novel aspect of the research from Aarhus University is that they examined the number of repetitions needed—and whether variation in the images removes the sense of satiety.

"We know from previous studies that images of different types of food don't have the same effect on satiety. That's why you can really feel full after the main course but still have room for dessert. Sweet things are a completely different type of food," he says.

To investigate whether variation in food completely removes the sense of satiety, Tjark Andersen and his colleagues designed a number of online experiments. They ended up getting more than 1,000 people through their digital experiments.

First they showed a picture of just orange M&Ms. Some participants were shown the picture three times, others 30 times. The group that saw the most pictures of M&Ms felt most satiated afterwards, explains Tjark Andersen.

"They had to answer how many M&Ms between 1 and 10 they wanted. The group which had seen 30 images of orange chocolate buttons, chose a smaller amount than the other two groups."

Afterwards, they repeated the experiment. This time with M&Ms in different colors. The colors did not change the result.

Finally, they replaced the M&Ms with Skittles. Unlike M&Ms, Skittles taste different depending on the color.

"If color didn't play a role, it must be the imagined taste. But we found no major effect here either. This suggests that more parameters than just color and flavor have to change before we can make a effect on satiety," he explains.

Could be used as a weight loss strategy

Since 1975, the number of overweight people worldwide has tripled. According to the WHO, obesity is one of the biggest health challenges facing humans. And the reason why we become overweight is that we eat too much food, especially too much unhealthy food, while not exercising frequently enough.

This is where Tjark Andersen's results come into the play. Perhaps they can be applied as a method to control appetite, he says.

"Think if you developed an app based on a Google search. Let's say you wanted pizza. You open the app. Choose pizza—and it shows a lot of photos of pizza while you imagine eating it. In this way, you could get a sense of satiety and maybe just stop wanting pizza."

Perhaps his results can best be used to ensure that you don't start a meal. The participants in the study only chose slightly fewer Skittles or M&Ms, corresponding to fewer than 50 calories.

"You won't save many calories unless you completely refrain from starting a meal. But perhaps the method can be used for this as well. It'd be interesting to investigate," he says.

Social media are overflowing with food

Tjark Andersen and a number of other researchers are studying how food advertisements on social media affect us, because we are constantly being confronted with delicious food.

In 2016, an American research group tried to find out how many advertisements with food we encounter on average when we are on social media. The researchers monitored a number of young people and mapped out the content they met.

On average, the young people saw 6.1 food-related posts in 12 hours. The vast majority of the posts were pictures of food—and more than a third were about desserts or other sweet food.

The internet and, in particular, social media can be a contributory factor in our becoming increasingly overweight. But it may also be the solution.

Only the future will tell.

The paper is published in the journal Appetite.

Source

A ball that is kicked head-on travels with the air flowing past it symmetrically in all directions. Friction with the surface of the ball causes the airflow to initially follow the contour of the ball before forming a turbulent wake that trails behind.

The interactions of this wake with the surrounding air are extremely complex but they form a significant part of the overall aerodynamic drag on the ball. This interaction changes when the ball is initially kicked off-centre, sending it spinning on its own axis as it travels.

The air flowing past the side of the ball rotating towards the direction of travel has a higher relative speed than the air over the opposite side. This deflects the ball’s wake sideways, in the direction of the spin, which creates a reaction force in the opposite direction.

This means that a ball kicked at the right of its centre will spin anti-clockwise and be deflected to the left. This deflection is called the Magnus effect, after the 19th-Century German physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus.

Although the spin of the ball slows down as it travels due to friction with the air, this is much less significant than the aerodynamic drag that causes the ball to lose forward speed. So the Magnus effect stays fairly constant even as the ball slows down. This causes the curvature to increase noticeably towards the end of the ball’s trajectory and the effect is even more pronounced with very light balls. Table tennis provides the most extreme demonstrations of this with very dramatic deflections achieved by experienced players.

Source

The horrifying crash took place at Stanford Ranch Road and Park Drive in the city of Rocklin, about 22 miles from Sacramento, just after 8 p.m.

William Wimsatt, a 12-year-old boy who witnessed the kindhearted stranger’s actions, told KCRA 3 the man had stepped out of his car to help the ducks avoid traffic.

“He got out of the car and was shooing the ducks and everyone was clapping because he was being really nice,” William said.

The young boy took photos of the man, who has not been identified, with his cellphone as he and the ducks crossed in front of his mother’s car.

“He helped them get up over the curb because all the little baby duckies were having trouble and then he walked in front of our car,” the boy recounted.

After the ducks made it safely to the other side of the road, William said, onlookers in their cars applauded the good Samaritan’s actions.

“My mom rolled down the window and said, ‘Good job, good job,’ and I said, ‘Good job’ to him too.”

Right after that, William said, the man was struck by a car that seemingly came out of nowhere.

The kindhearted man, who has not been publicly named, helped the family of ducks safely make it to the other side of the street.
William Wimsatt

“I didn’t see the car actually hit him. All I remember is the sound and then him flying across the intersection,” he said.

“His shoes and one of his socks were right in front of our car.”

Another woman, Summer Peterson, told KOVR that her child also saw the tragedy unfold.

“They were saying, ‘Oh, it’s so cute. It’s so nice of him.’ And then all of a sudden he was hit by a car,” she told the outlet at a makeshift memorial for the man on Friday.

A memorial of rubber duckies and flowers was left near the site of the accident.
KCRA

After the accident, William’s mother got out of her car and comforted the man’s children, who were sitting in their own car and witnessed the crash.

A makeshift memorial — full of rubber duckies and flowers — was set up on the corner where the accident occurred.

William said he hopes people remember the man for his kindness.

“He was the only person to get out of the car and try and help them and probably the nicest person in the entire area. It’s not fair,” he said.

Police are still investigating the cause of the fatality.

The driver, a 17-year-old girl, is cooperating with authorities and is not currently facing any charges.

DUI is not suspected, KOVR reported.

Source

A new experiment hopes to reveal key information about the mysterious neutrino particle, which plays a role in some of the most fundamental questions in physics

Of all the billion-dollar physics experiments, I’m particularly fond of those that have a “does what it says on the tin” name: the Extremely Large Telescope, the International Space Station . . . and now there’s a new one to add to the list: the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. The DUNE project will investigate the neutrino – the tiniest of fundamental particles, meaning “the little neutral one” in Italian. It is being constructed one mile deep below Sanford Lab in South Dakota.

Neutrinos are so tiny that they barely interact with anything and simply glide straight through you, through the Earth and out the other side. But these particles have a mighty role to play in helping us understand some of the most fundamental questions in physics: What is the origin of matter and why is there an imbalance of matter and anti-matter? Is there a grand unifying theory that connects all forces? How do black holes form?

More than 1,000 scientists and engineers, from 200 labs and universities across 30 countries, are collaborating to build DUNE in the hope it will reveal key information about this mysterious particle. The DUNE experiment starts with an underground particle accelerator, where particles will smash into a target to generate an intense beam of neutrinos that will travel through the ground towards the detectors. That’s the easy part. The real challenge is in the design and construction of huge, highly complex detector systems that are capable of seeing a particle that doesn’t want to be seen.

Each of four detector modules will be a liquid-argon chamber filled with 17,000 tons of argon. Neutrinos colliding with argon atoms will produce charged particles that in turn knock out electrons that will be detected by 150 2.3m x 6m units of tightly-wound copper beryllium wires, thus providing a signal that can be recorded as neutrino data. And now the DUNE collaboration has announced the exciting news that mass production for this first, colossal detector module has started, after a series of successful prototype tests at CERN.

Source

Even ignoring the funding challenges to a rebuilding project, a true rebuilding of the Arecibo Telescope is unlikely. At the time of its construction, it was the most sensitive radio telescope ever, but in the past sixty years radio technology has advanced considerably. Even during its operation, Arecibo had some limitations. For example, it wasn't truly steerable, meaning that its coverage of the sky was limited. And as a single-dish telescope, it wasn't as adaptable as modern array telescopes. But Arecibo was also very good at radar astronomy, which other telescopes are not, so it filled an observational niche.

There are several proposals to replace the Arecibo telescope with a modern observatory. One recent proposal has introduced a design that is in many ways a compromise plan. It tries to maintain many of the advantages of a large single dish while introducing a more flexible design similar to an array telescope. They call it the Next Generation Arecibo Telescope. The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.

One of the first things this design does is get rid of the single dish. While there are modern single-dish telescopes, such as the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), they are much larger than Arecibo's original 300-meter design. It isn't feasible to build an even larger single dish at the Arecibo location. So the team proposes an array of 102 13-meter dishes. In comparison, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has 54 12-meter dishes and a dozen 7-meter dishes. Rather than building them as movable dishes like ALMA, the team proposes arranging them in a fixed circular array 130 meters across. This would be less than half the diameter of the original Arecibo Telescope, but with more than a hundred receivers it would be far more sensitive.

The sensitivity range of the proposed NGAT-130. Credit: Roshi et al

By placing the dishes in such a configuration, the new design could function as a single dish. Most array telescopes gather data as individual dishes, then integrate the data through a process called correlation. This allows for an array to act as a single virtual dish but does so at some cost of sensitivity. Another way to combine data is called a phased array, which integrates the data as if the dishes were all at the same point.

The phased array method loses resolution, but gains you significant sensitivity. As part of the Event Horizon Telescope, which made the first direct observations of black holes, ALMA was configured as a phased array to boost the overall sensitivity of the EHT. Through the phased array, this design would act as a highly sensitive single dish, which was one of the main strengths of the original Arecibo Telescope.

The array design would also allow Arecibo to be steerable. And it would be significantly lighter and easier to maintain than the original design. Estimates put its overall weight at about half that of the Green Bank Telescope, which has only a 100-meter diameter.

It's an interesting design, but at this stage, there are several interesting designs being proposed. The process from initial idea to approved design to construction is long and arduous, to say nothing of the challenge of funding. It could be decades before a new telescope is built at Arecibo Observatory. But designs such as this show how astronomers leverage both the old and the new and find amazing ways to explore the universe more than ever before.

Source

An oak tree. The symbiotic fungus intertwined with its roots. A cardinal chirping from one of its branches. Our best clue yet to their shared ancestor might have arrived in electron microscope images that were unveiled in December.

“Look!” said microbiologist Christa Schleper, beaming as she held a printed, high-resolution image in front of her webcam at the University of Vienna. “Isn’t it beautiful?” The cells in the micrograph were 500-nanometer-wide orbs, each surrounded by a Medusa-like halo of tendrils. Her team had not only isolated and cultivated the organism for the first time but shown that its flailing filaments were made of actin, the protein that forms a skeletal scaffold in almost all complex cells, or eukaryotes.

But this was no complex cell. It looked more ancestral, primordial. The organism, first published in Nature, is only the second representative of a group of microbes called Asgard archaea to be grown and studied in detail. Coaxing it to grow out of a tiny spoonful of seafloor sludge, which took six years, was like preparing a dressing room for a temperamental celebrity. The organism couldn’t be centrifuged, stirred, exposed to oxygen, separated from a few other microbes it pals around with, or rushed into growing any faster than a glacial pace.

For months, it didn’t even grow at all. “I worried also for my own future in science,” said Thiago Rodrigues-Oliveira, who led the effort to cultivate the new species as a postdoc in Schleper’s lab, betting his own career on the whims of a single, recalcitrant organism.

As excruciatingly difficult as they are to deal with, the Asgard archaea are now among the most coveted organisms in science, and for good reason. To many evolutionary biologists, their discovery and subsequent studies justify revising the textbook pictures of the tree of life to situate us—and every other creature built from eukaryotic cells—as mere offshoots of the Asgard group.

The microbiologist Christa Schleper leads the archaea ecology and evolution group at the University of Vienna.

Recently, her laboratory isolated and cultivated a new Asgard archaeon, only the second organism from that

group to be studied in detail.Courtesy of Schleper Lab

Studies of Asgard genomes, meanwhile, have brought badly needed data to the question of how eukaryotes evolved, an epochal event in Earth’s history that inspires contentious debates. Most of the studies to date have had to rely on indirect genetic probes of the Asgard group, which don’t offer the same opportunities as prodding living microbes in a lab, the gold standard in microbiology since the days of Louis Pasteur.

Now a high-stakes, slow-motion race is on as labs around the world attempt to grow their own Asgard cultures. Samples aren’t shared; growth strategies are tightly guarded secrets. “We were honestly shocked” when the Schleper team’s results came out, wrote Hiroyuki Imachi, a microbiologist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology who, after a grueling 12-year effort, isolated the first and currently only other Asgard archaea sample.

They aren’t the only ones. Thijs Ettema, an evolutionary microbiologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, hinted that his lab had made progress toward enriching Asgard cultures too, and he guessed that at least 10 other labs had similar projects underway. “They wouldn’t be telling me,” he said.

Piecing Together an Organism

The trail that led to Asgard archaea first warmed up a decade ago. That’s when a team including Ettema, Schleper, and Anja Spang, who is now an evolutionary microbiologist at the University of Amsterdam, set out to find what they hoped would be an evolutionary missing link.

Biologists had long used genetic data to sort all known organisms into three taxonomic bins: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. But they disagreed vociferously on how to draw the family tree that should tie these groups together.

Carl Woese, the influential American microbiologist who discovered archaea in the late 1970s, held that the three groups stood on their own, each alike in dignity, representing distinct “domains” of life. In the view of Woese and his allies, the archaea and the eukaryotes were sister groups descended from an older progenitor. Their opponents argued for a “two-domain” tree of just bacteria and archaea, claiming that eukaryotes had evolved directly from archaea.

Camps formed; positions grew entrenched. “Anything that has to do with our origin, independent of how far you go back in time, is something humans care deeply about,” Spang said.

Years before the new organisms were isolated, microbial surveys  picked up hints of an unknown group of archaea with genomes suspiciously close to those of eukaryotes in marine sediments around the world. One study, led by Steffen Jørgensen, Schleper’s doctoral student, showed that these mysterious microbes were thriving in seafloor muck scooped up near a hydrothermal vent in the Atlantic Ocean in 2008. Working with 7.5 grams of mud from these same samples, the team began fishing out longer sequences of stray DNA.

Their intermediate goal was to use a 20-year-old technique called metagenomics to obtain genetic sequences from each organism present. Imagine you have a mixed-up pile of pieces from thousands of puzzles, Spang explained. First you figure out which pieces belong to each puzzle. Then you put each puzzle together. Metagenomics can assemble genomes this way, working only from the DNA of microbes lurking in the mud.

That analysis, published in 2015, unearthed one particularly provocative genome. The organism it belonged to seemed to be the most eukaryote-like archaeon ever discovered, with genes for at least 175 proteins that strongly resembled eukaryotic proteins. The researchers argued that all eukaryotes might have sprung from a close relative of that very archaeon, a view strongly supporting the two-domain version of the tree of life.

Ettema named the organism Lokiarcheota. The name was a nod to Loki’s Castle, the hydrothermal vent formation near where the samples had been collected. But the 2015 paper gave an additional reason. “Loki has been described as ‘a staggeringly complex, confusing, and ambivalent figure who has been the catalyst of countless unresolved scholarly controversies,’” they wrote, quoting a scholar of Scandinavian literature. The allusion seemed to fit the contentiousness surrounding eukaryogenesis, the origin of complex cells.

Their discovery soon came under fire from proponents of the three-domain model. Did the Loki organisms really exist? Or had Spang done the metagenomic puzzle-solving wrong and mixed up the genomes of several different microbes into one chimerical, imaginary creature?

But soon Ettema, Spang, and many other collaborators uncovered genetic sequences similar to that of the Loki organism in hot springs, aquifers, and both saltwater and freshwater sediments around the world. The organisms weren’t rare at all. They had just been overlooked.

Scientists gave the emerging groups new names that kept to the Norse mythology theme—Odin, Thor, Hel, Heimdall—and referred to the entire realm as the Asgard archaea, after the home of the Norse gods. The additional genomes also seemed to include many eukaryote-like proteins, which further supported the two-domain version of the tree of life in which our eukaryotic branch sprouted from an Asgard ancestor.

Even so, resolving where eukaryogenesis happened in life’s family tree did little to resolve debates around how that process unfolded. Biologists suspected that studying living examples of Asgard archaea might yield more insights than they could glean from looking at fragments of DNA. In 2015, soon after the Asgard group was discovered, Schleper began trying to grow a Loki in Austria.

Unbeknownst to them all, though, one was already multiplying, ever so slowly, in cultivation in Japan.

A Microbe That Plays Hard to Get

“My first name, Hiro, means ‘tolerant,’” Imachi told Quanta in a 2020 interview. “I think [being] tolerant and patient is—how to say it—important in my life.”

In 2006, off the coast of Japan, a crewed submersible called the Shinkai 6500 drilled a core of black, sulfurous sediment out of the floor of a trench under 2.5 kilometers of ocean. Later that year, Imachi put some of this sediment into bioreactors that could simulate a deep-sea environment; he had adapted the equipment from sewage treatment systems for developing countries. Then he settled in to see what this strange garden might grow.

Metagenomics had already revealed that the entirety of known culturable organisms represented just a fraction of nature’s true microbial diversity. Imachi, then a few years out of graduate school, had dedicated his career to the quixotic goal of bringing all microbes into cultivation. To grow something like a Loki for laboratory study, though, would require clearing several daunting hurdles at once.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine;

image courtesy of Florian Wollweber, ETH Zürich (Pilhofer lab)

First, any small piece of seafloor mud hosts hundreds of microbial species. To strip away unwanted bacteria, you can add antibiotics, which are lethal to bacteria but tolerated by archaea. But the antibiotics might also kill symbiotic bacterial species that your target archaeon can’t live without. So it’s necessary to experiment with various antibiotics at different concentrations to find a treatment that’s only appropriately lethal.

Second, you have to find the right mix of nutrients, medium, and sediments for your target organism to thrive in. Finally, you have to wait and wait for the target to grow to concentrations high enough to find under an electron microscope or to experiment on. When it’s happy, the organism that Imachi was nurturing divides about once every two or three weeks. By comparison, Escherichia coli, the bacterial workhorse in many microbiology labs, obligingly doubles itself in just 20 minutes.

Five and a half years after their samples went into Imachi’s bioreactor, the Japanese team inoculated whatever was growing inside into little glass tubes. After about a year, they noticed faint signs of life within one tube dosed with antibiotics. Then they started trying to push their target—which they saw had sequences matching those of the Lokiarcheota group Spang had published in 2015—to higher concentrations.

In the summer of 2019, shortly before uploading their manuscript to a preprint server, Imachi sent Ettema a draft paper announcing their success. Ettema recalled his first glimpse of the creature he had been studying through genetic sequences for years. “It looked like an organism from a different planet,” he said. “I’ve never seen something like that.”

The Japanese group’s electron microscope images ended the debate over whether the Loki organism was real or an artifact of metagenomics. But their work also established two crucial new discoveries about the Loki archaea: that the organism surrounded itself with tiny arms, and that it seemed to thrive in codependent clumps with a sulfate-reducing bacterium and another species of archaeon that produced methane.

Meanwhile, in Schleper’s lab in Austria, the initial six-year grant was dwindling, and no new funding was in sight. One postdoc assigned to the task of growing the organism had ended up leaving science. Another team member, a technician, had pipetted so much they needed surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome.

In the fall of 2019, however, a culture of a Loki organism started by Rodrigues-Oliveira began to inch along. It divided in about half the time as the Japanese strain, and it reached densities 50 to 100 times higher. Even so, working with it could still be like leafing through a Where’s Waldo? book: In 36 hours of scanning samples through an electron microscope, Schleper said, the team spotted just 17 individual specimens.

Last December, they debuted their results in Nature. This Loki, too, had tentacle-like filaments that Schleper’s group speculate might entangle other organisms and interact with them. Scooping the Japanese team, they showed that the tentacles were made of a protein, Lokiactin, that closely resembles the actin with which eukaryotic cells build supportive cytoskeletons. So not only is the Lokiactin gene like a eukaryotic gene, but it performs a eukaryote-like function.

The Lokiactin gene also pops up in every one of the 172 or so Asgard genomes that scientists have encountered. That implies that the ancestor of the entire group—and maybe the ancestor of all eukaryotes—might have had a similar proto-skeleton.

So what is Schleper’s lab trying to do with the organism now? “Everything!” she said, laughing.

Reaching Out to Form Complex Cells

Within the now-dominant two-domain picture to which the Asgard archaea are contributing, the big story of life on this planet goes something like this. Some 4 billion years ago, life forked into two single-celled branches, the archaea and the bacteria.

Genetic evidence implies that the two branches crossed again 2 billion years later when an archaeon—likely from the Asgard group—somehow ingested a bacterium. The process domesticated what was once a distinct, free-living cell and turned it into the organelles called mitochondria that persist inside eukaryotic cells. The descendants of that fateful union branched into other single-celled organisms like dinoflagellates, and then later into multicellular creatures that grew to macroscopic sizes, left fossils behind, and colonized both sea and land.

But even theorists who stand behind this narrative belong to divided camps. Some argue that gaining mitochondria was the defining event in eukaryogenesis. Others insist that mitochondria arrived late in an ongoing transition.

“You might have had Asgard archaea that were already quite complex and quite eukaryote-like,” said Tom Williams, a computational microbiologist at the University of Bristol, describing the latter position. “Then they acquired mitochondria, in an extreme form of this view, as a sort of icing on the cake.” Williams, however, thinks that mitochondria were acquired earlier than that: The complexity of the Asgards has just tipped the discussion toward an intermediate view, he said.

But the data from research on Asgards has also constrained the eukaryogenesis debate in other ways. For one thing, both of the Asgards cultivated so far have proved hard to separate from an entourage of other microbes. Like the Japanese Loki, the Austrian organisms seems to prefer—even depend on—having an extra species of archaeon and another sulfate-reducing bacterium in culture with them. Scholars working on eukaryogenesis, such as Purificación López-García at the French National Center for Scientific Research, have long promoted the idea that mitochondria were first captured from within just this kind of “syntropic” partnership, where multiple species live interdependently.

The finding that Lokis have actin tentacles adds plausibility to a eukaryogenesis scenario called the inside-out model, Spang and Schleper said. In 2014, the cell biologist Buzz Baum at University College London and his cousin, the evolutionary biologist David Baum of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, proposed an idea they had kicked around at family events: that the first eukaryotes were born after a simple ancestral cell extended protrusions past its cell walls. First these arms reached toward a symbiotic bacterium. Eventually they closed around that partner, turning it into a proto-mitochondrion. Both the original archaeal cell and the captured symbiote were enveloped within a skeleton provided by the arms.

Back when Asgard archaea were still known only from scraps of environmental DNA, Baum had asked attendees at a conference to draw what they thought the organisms would look like. His own drawing based on the inside-out ideas, which predicted that they would sport protruding arms, surprised the other assembled scientists. At the time, Schleper said, it seemed “so odd that he makes this funny suggestion.”

A Competitive Atmosphere

The events of eukaryogenesis have been so obscured by intervening time and gene-swapping that we may never know them with certainty.

The two Loki species currently in culture, for example, are modern-day organisms that differ from ancient archaea in the same way that a living, singing cardinal differs from the ancestral dinosaur from which it evolved. The Loki group isn’t even the subset of Asgard archaea that genetic analyses suggest is most closely related to eukaryotes. (Based on known Asgard genomes, a preprint posted by Ettema and his colleagues in March argued that the ancestor of eukaryotes was a Heimdall archaeon.)

Still, labs around the world are gambling that bringing more diverse representatives of the Asgard group into cultivation will yield a bonanza of new clues about their—and our—common ancestor. Schleper is trying. So is Ettema. So is Baum, who said his lab is soon welcoming a new colleague who will bring vials of archaea from groups like Heimdall and Odin. So is Imachi, who declined to speak to Quanta for this story.

“If I were to be interviewed by you now, I would most likely talk about new data that has not yet been published,” he explained in an email, adding that his group applauded the Schleper team’s efforts. “It is very competitive now (although I do not like this kind of competition),” he added.

Other sources also bemoaned the overly pressurized atmosphere. “It would be nice if the field would be more open to sharing,” Spang said. The pressure weighs heaviest on the young scientists who tend to take on the high-risk, high-reward cultivation projects. Success can add a glowing Nature paper to their resume. But wasting years on a failed effort can stunt their chances of ever getting a job in science. “It’s really an unfair situation,” Schleper said.

For now, though, the race continues. When the Baum cousins published their ideas about eukaryogenesis in 2014, Buzz Baum said, they assumed we’d probably never know the truth. Then suddenly the Asgards showed up, offering new glimpses of the liminal, transitional stages that boosted life from single-celled simplicity into overdrive.

“Before we destroy this beautiful planet, we should do a bit of looking, because there’s cool things on planet Earth we know nothing about. Maybe there are things that are sort of living fossils—states in between,” he said. “Maybe it’s on my shower curtain.”

Primitive Asgard Cells Show Life on the Brink of Complexity

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Rayyanah Barnawi, a breast cancer researcher, will become the first Saudi woman to voyage into space and will be joined on the mission by fellow Saudi Ali Al-Qarni, a fighter pilot.

The Axiom Mission 2 (Ax-2) crew will take off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in the southern state of Florida at 5:37 pm (2137 GMT).

The team also includes Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who will be making her fourth flight to the ISS, and John Shoffner, a businessman from Tennessee who will serve as pilot.

They are due to spend around 10 days on board the ISS, where they should arrive around 1:30 pm on Monday.

"Being the first Saudi woman astronaut, representing the region, it's a great pleasure and honor that I'm very happy to carry," said Barnawi at a recent press conference.

She added that, aside from excitement for the research she will carry out on board, she is looking forward to sharing her experience with kids while on the ISS.

"Being able to see their faces when they see astronauts from their own region for the first time is very thrilling," she said.

A career fighter pilot, Al-Qarni said he has "always had the passion of exploring the unknown and just admiring the sky and the stars."

"It is a great opportunity for me to pursue this kind of passion that I have, and now maybe just fly among the stars."

The mission is not Saudi Arabia's first foray into space.

In 1985, Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, an air force pilot, took part in a US-organized space voyage.

But the space mission involving a Saudi woman is the latest move by the oil-rich Gulf kingdom, where women only gained the right to drive a few years ago, to revamp its ultraconservative image.

The kingdom established the Saudi Space Commission in 2018 and launched a program last year to send astronauts into space.

Experiments

The four-member team is set to carry out some 20 experiments while on the ISS.

One of them involves studying the behavior of stem cells in zero gravity.

They will join seven others already on board the ISS: three Russians, three Americans and Emirati astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi, who was the first Arab national to go on a spacewalk last month.

The mission to the ISS will be the second in partnership with ISS-key holder NASA by Axiom Space, a private space company, which offers the rare voyages for sums that run into the millions of dollars.

The company oversees training the astronauts, chartering their means of transport and ensuring the smooth management of their stay.

Axiom Space carried out its first private astronaut mission to the ISS in April 2022, sending three businessmen and former astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria to spend 17 days in orbit as part of Ax-1.

Some astronauts on the ISS at the time said they had to take time out of their day—precious in zero gravity—to take care of the space tourists.

"My time is actually a lot less constrained than Mike Lopez-Alegria's time was on the first mission," said Whitson. "I'll be available to help the crew members a lot more as they need assistance."

Private space stations

For Axiom Space, these missions are a first step toward an ambitious goal: the construction of its own space station, with the first module expected to launch in 2025.

The station would at first be attached to the ISS before separating and orbiting independently.

NASA plans to retire the ISS around 2030 and to instead send astronauts to private stations, which will also host their own clients, leading the US space agency to encourage the development of programs by several companies.

Russia recently agreed to extend its use of the ISS until 2028, having threatened an earlier pullout last year as ties unraveled between the Kremlin and the West over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

The other international partners—Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency—have committed themselves, like the United States, to continue operations until 2030.

© 2023 AFP

Source

Sunday, May 21

Kinetica 1

The first launch this week is CAS Space’s Kinetica 1 rocket. This launch was meant to happen last week but got delayed. If the launch goes ahead, it will be the second time the Kinetica 1 rocket has ever flown and will be carrying the Fucheng 1 and Luojia 2-01 satellites to orbit.

The mission is set to take off at 8:40 a.m. UTC from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre. It’s not expected that there will be a stream of the event but we should have footage in next week’s recap.

Falcon 9

Next up, also taking place on Sunday, is the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying the Ax-2 Crew Dragon. The company is working with Axiom Space to send several astronauts to the International Space Station for a week.

The crew includes Axiom astronaut Peggy Whitson, Saudi astronauts Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali AlQarni, and private astronaut John Shoffner. The mission will blast off at 9:37 p.m. UTC from Florida and will be streamed live.

Monday, May 22

Falcon 9

On Monday morning at 3:25 a.m. UTC, SpaceX will launch another Falcon 9, this time carrying the Arabsat 7B communications satellite. It’s being launched for the Saudi Arabian company Arabsat, into a geostationary orbit.

The satellite will be launched from Cape Canaveral and will provide communications coverage across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The launch will take place from Cape Canaveral and will be broadcast on SpaceX’s website.

Electron

Later on Monday, at 5:30 a.m. UTC, Rocket Lab will launch an Electron rocket carrying NASA’s TROPICS satellites. Rocket Lab orbited two other TROPICS satellites a few weeks ago, but these are additional satellites.

The event should be streamed on the company’s website closer to the event. As the name suggests, these satellites will be used to measure the environmental and inner-core conditions of tropical cyclones around the world.

Wednesday, May 24

Nuri

The Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) is up first on Wednesday with the launch of its Nuri rocket carrying eight satellites to orbit. The mission is set to launch at 9:24 a.m. UTC from the Naro Space Centre and the launch will be streamed on YouTube.

The launch will orbit several satellites including NEXTSat 2 and four satellites developed by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute codenamed SNIPE. There will also be secondary payloads, mainly CubeSats.

Soyuz 2.1a

The final launch on Wednesday is Roscosmos’ Soyuz 2.1a which will carry the 84th Progress cargo delivery ship to the International Space Station.

This mission is set for 12:56 p.m. UTC from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It’s not clear whether there will be a live stream of the event but there should be a recap video next week.

Friday, May 26

Soyuz 2.1a

The final launch of the week is yet another Roscosmos Soyuz 2.1a rocket. This time it will be launching the Kondor-FKA radar Earth observation satellite for the Russian Ministry of Defence.

There are also going to be several secondary payloads launched that will be managed by Glavkosmos. The Kondor-FKA satellite is a civilian radar Earth observation satellite and has an expected life expectancy of five years.

Recap

The first launch we got last week was a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit. The first stage of the rocket also landed on a droneship ready for reuse.

Next up, China launched one of its Long March 3B rockets carrying a backup BeiDou-3 navigation satellite that phones around the world could connect with to find their location.

On Friday, SpaceX launches set another batch of Starlink satellites atop a Falcon 9.

The last mission we got was a third Falcon 9, this time carrying OneWeb and Iridium satellites to space. OneWeb satellites will be used to beam internet connectivity to the Earth.

That’s all for this week, check in next time.

TWIRL 115: SpaceX and Axiom Space to send astronauts to ISS for a week

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Thanks to years of campaigning by wildlife conservation groups, it’s widely known that Africa’s elephants and rhinos are threatened by the trade in their valuable tusks and horns. Laws and regulations have been tightened, and in many countries it’s now difficult, if not impossible, to legally sell elephant and rhino products.

Less well known is that Africa’s other large pachyderm, the common hippopotamus, is also threatened in many parts of the continent, and that thousands of hippo products, including leather, skulls, and teeth, are legally bought and sold around the world every year.

A small consortium of US animal welfare and conservation groups is now trying to change this, pressing the US government to increase legal protections for the common hippopotamus under the Endangered Species Act.

Africa has two species of hippo: the endangered pygmy hippopotamus, found in a small part of West Africa, and the larger common hippopotamus, found across large swathes of sub-Saharan Africa. But despite its name, the common hippo isn’t common throughout its native range. It has been extirpated from at least four countries, and its populations are small and declining in many more. In some countries where the species was recently abundant, only tens or a few hundred individuals are left.

On February 15, World Hippo Day, the Humane Society of the United States, the Humane Society Legislative Fund, the Humane Society International, and the Center for Biological Diversity announced that they planned to sue the US Fish and Wildlife Service in an attempt to force the agency to consider listing the common hippo under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). “As the top global importer of hippo [parts], the United States government can no longer ignore its responsibility and the critical role it can play in curbing legal trade,” said Adam Peyman of the Humane Society International (HSI). Listing the species as endangered, the organizations said, “would place near-total restrictions on most imports and sales of hippo specimens and provide awareness and funding to achieve the ESA’s conservation goals.”

The tactic worked. The Fish and Wildlife Service is now soliciting comments before deciding whether to start the listing process. Designating the hippo “endangered”—it is already listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—would not completely halt the importation of hunting trophies, said Tanya Sanerib, international legal director of the Center for Biological Diversity. But it would require the agency to ensure that the hunting “enhances the survival of the species.” Prospective importers would have to prove that the hippo hunting had conservation benefits, a difficult and time-consuming task. Listing a foreign species under the ESA would also allow the US government to dedicate funds to its conservation.

Many hippo experts welcomed the new attention on the animal, which has long been neglected in research and conservation circles. But they say that the trade in hippo parts is hardly the animal’s biggest threat and that banning this trade will likely have no conservation benefit. Unless the ESA listing spurs consideration of far more serious threats to hippos, these experts say, the move will likely be meaningless. And it may even cause harm.

Hippos are curvaceous vegetarians that spend most of the day lazing around in water with just their large nostrils; tiny eyes; and small, swiveling ears projecting above the surface. Because they are vulnerable to sunburn, they must keep their skin hydrated. Although they inspire motherly, comical, or friendly characters in children’s books and TV shows, common hippos are dangerous beasts. The species ranks, with crocodiles and venomous snakes, near the top of the list of Africa’s most deadly animals, says Simon Pooley, an expert on human-wildlife conflict in Southern Africa.

Among land mammals, the common hippo ranks in size just behind the two African elephant species and the white rhinoceros. A large male can weigh roughly 4,500 pounds. Hippo jaws can open to almost 180 degrees, exposing fearsome front teeth, including sharp canines that project up to 20 inches from their gums. They can be highly territorial, often attacking and sinking small boats that approach too closely. At night, hippos leave the water to graze on land, where they sometimes encounter people. Given that panicked hippos can gallop at 19 miles per hour, these meetings can end fatally for humans.

Despite their size and strength, hippos are easily hunted. They’re simple to find and to shoot in the water. And if a hunter doesn’t have a gun, a piece of nail-spiked wood or a wire snare placed on a hippo’s habitual waterside trail will cut open its feet, triggering a fatal infection.

Thousands of hippos are killed annually, mostly by Africans who live near them but also by visiting sport shooters. Hunters often take specific parts from carcasses, including teeth, which make a low-quality elephant ivory substitute; skin, which can become marketable leather; and bones, a curio for collectors. Many of these parts are sold to intermediaries and make their way into international markets.

In a joint press release, the group advocating for listing the hippo as endangered stated that between 2009 and 2018, parts from at least 3,081 hippos had been legally imported into the US. Hippo experts don’t dispute that number, but they don’t believe it indicates that significant numbers of hippos are dying for the trade in their parts. The animals, they say, are almost always killed for other reasons.

In many African countries, hippos and people increasingly compete for fertile land and fresh water. “Hippos require very much the same resources as we do,” says Rebecca Lewison of San Diego State University, who cochairs the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Hippo Specialist Group. Irrigation schemes and climate-change-induced droughts dry up water bodies, and new dams flood hippo habitat. Every day people carve out new fields and orchards alongside hippo-filled rivers and lakes, so the animals increasingly feed on human crops and come into conflict with ever more people. Moreover, their flesh is rich and tasty, and a single animal can yield more than a thousand pounds of meat—enough to feed a whole community or generate large profits at a local market.

“My view is that the US trade [in hippo parts] is largely a byproduct of other reasons for killing,” says Crawford Allan, a wildlife trade expert with the World Wildlife Fund. In Africa, he says, “nobody wastes anything. So if you kill an animal because it’s a danger to your community, then you eat the meat, you sell the skin, you sell the teeth, you sell the skull to taxidermy collectors.” Hippo parts like teeth and skin, he says, are not worth enough to local hunters to provide an important reason for killing them.

Other experts echo this opinion. Lewison cites the example of Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the hippo population declined from almost 30,000 in the mid-1970s to fewer than 1,000 by 2005. The animals were killed during civil unrest and war “when everyone was starving. And they ate them.”

Lewison acknowledges that hippo parts are sometimes found in seizures of trafficked wildlife products, but she says that they form a tiny part of the illegal wildlife trade, which is sustained by far more valuable products, like elephant ivory and rhino horn.

An analysis of official trade numbers by HSI and its collaborators showed that, of the hippo products imported to the US between 2008 and 2019, 2,074 were hunting trophies. (Other nations legally imported roughly 2,000 more hippo trophies during the same period). However, a trade database compiled by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora reveals that virtually all the trophies and other hippo parts tabulated by the HSI came from countries with large, apparently well-managed hippo populations. Neither HSI nor the Center for Biological Diversity provided any data that linked hunting trophies or other legally traded parts to hippo declines.

Paul Scholte, an Ethiopia-based member of the Hippo Specialist Group, says that regulated trophy hunting can have conservation benefits. With local colleagues, he conducted and published surveys of hippo populations in northern Cameroon that show declines in government-run conservation areas and either stable or increasing populations in areas leased by private trophy-hunting outfitters.

“The factor that explains if a population of hippo is stable or not is a year-round presence of protection—of rangers or scouts,” Scholte says, explaining that government rangers do not patrol during much of the rainy season, when moving around is difficult. Trophy-hunting companies, however, have the funding and motivation to continuously protect their concession areas from the poachers and illegal gold miners who kill hippos in that region.

Hippo experts say the focus on the parts trade is a distraction from more important issues and that it escalates friction between African countries. They point out that southern and eastern African countries—which have larger and better-managed conservation areas—generally host more secure hippo populations than do countries in Central and West Africa, where many populations are on the brink of extirpation.

These varying circumstances lead to different views on conservation policy: West and Central African authorities generally favor wildlife trade bans, which they believe would discourage poaching of their extremely vulnerable populations, while most countries in southern Africa and some in East Africa argue that their populations are large enough to sustain hunting and commercial trade, which fund wildlife conservation.

Experts warn that imposing a one-size-fits-all “solution”—such as an ESA listing—on the African continent could create serious problems. Allan, of the World Wildlife Fund, says “it sets up a division that isn’t healthy” between countries that want to make consumptive use of their wildlife and those that don’t. Banning imports of hippo products from some countries while allowing them from others, he adds, would create an “enforcement nightmare” because parts from different regions are essentially indistinguishable. The legal trade could thus be used to launder poached items.

Rebecca Lewison says that hippos have been understudied for decades. Even basic hippo population estimates are years out of date, in part due to pandemic-related delays. The Hippo Specialist Group’s latest effort to gather population numbers is only getting underway now, and it’s possible that it will discover some populations are not as healthy as they used to be.

Hippo declines would have knock-on effects for other species too. Hippos are important shapers of aquatic ecosystems: As they move around, they keep river channels open, and because they are so large, they can consume tough, tall species of grasses, creating “grazing lawns” of short, palatable grasses that support other animals.

Recent research by Scholte shows that a hippo population collapse in the Ivory Coast’s Comoé National Park during a recent civil war has led to a massive, sustained reduction in numbers of the Buffon’s kob, a type of antelope. With no hippos to maintain them, the park’s grazing lawns have been overtaken by dense thickets of unpalatable tall grasses, and the kob population has dropped from more than 50,000 to fewer than 3,000.

Lewison says that more money and expertise are urgently needed for hippo research and protection. Robust surveys are required to identify the populations most at risk, she says. New methods to reduce human-hippo conflict must be developed. Hippo habitat conservation needs better funding. And populations at risk of poaching must be protected.

The push to list hippos as endangered, says Lewison, “may be the first step toward really engaging a wider audience and global conservation efforts. But if it succeeds, it is only a small beginning.”

Hippos Are in Trouble. Will ‘Endangered’ Status Save Them?

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